Buck Studies

Buck Studies is a massive informational architecture of masteries and murders: tellings and re-tellings; legends, myths, sacred and profane narratives of race and Christs and media; pornos and pastorals of who-owns-who on what island and who gets to live in these paradises and who gets to die for them. Who gets to look and who gets to buy. Douglas Kearney addresses and redresses all the language that’s got away, with diagrammatic and dramatic compositions on paper, in the air and in the ear.

“Lurking below the pure alchemy in Kearney’s Buck Studies is a language that constantly flirts with collapse. The combination of an out-of-joint lyric with a mille-feuille of text reveals the transformative subject of the black body quelled, contained, caricatured, and dismembered. Absurdity marries intellect here while a frenetic melancholy embraces the ceaseless nature of historical despair. And yet, we still encounter humor, perverse and sprung from chaos. Buck Studies is a peek behind the curtain of a brilliant mind resigned to the fact that “the torments must go on mustn’t they for the tremble tremble tremble…” if nothing else.” —Ruth Ellen Kocher